Conventional systems store data in databases, typically in a relational manner. The type of information may vary depending on the businesses being handled. For example, a business may use a database to store information about its sales, clients, revenues, etc. Maintaining a database owing to the large volumes of data being stored becomes a complicated task. This is a significant hindrance to data integration within an organization or between business partners. However, these actions can be time consuming, complicated, expensive and undesirable for any organization.
Many such conventional systems use markup languages such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) to represent the data stored in the databases. XML provides the ability to represent the data in a relational manner, based on the data which is stored in the database. Furthermore, it also allows an efficient mechanism for transferring or representing data stored in the databases. However, XML generation from the database is a difficult and complicated task and is extremely time consuming.
One way of generating an XML representation of the data stored in the database is by using queries, such as queries based on SQL. Such queries, referred to as SQL-XML query when executed provide an XML document or file as a representation of the data stored in the database. SQL-XML queries are manually coded. In cases where the amount of data is large, coding and testing of SQL-XML queries becomes burdensome and a complex activity.